Why Your LinkedIn Links Look Broken (And Exactly How to Fix It)
You wrote a great post. You spent 20 minutes on it. You paste your link and LinkedIn tells you: "Cannot display preview. You can post as is, or try another link."
Or the image shows up — but it's the wrong one. Your company logo from 2019. A random stock photo from a blog post three years ago. A gray placeholder with nothing in it.
This happens to everyone. It's not a bug with your post. It's a fixable problem with how platforms read metadata from websites — and once you understand it, you'll never have a broken preview again.
What Actually Creates a Link Preview
When you paste a URL into LinkedIn, Twitter, Slack, iMessage, or any other platform, that platform sends a bot to your URL to read a few lines of code called Open Graph tags. These are invisible HTML meta tags that sit in the <head> of your page and tell platforms exactly what to show: the title, description, and image.
The four that matter most are og:title, og:description, og:image, and og:url. If these tags are missing, malformed, or pointing to an inaccessible image, the platform either shows nothing — or falls back to something random it found on your page.
Why LinkedIn Specifically Is So Frustrating
LinkedIn is stricter than most platforms. Image size requirements are unforgiving — LinkedIn requires a minimum of 1200×627px. If your og:image is even 1 pixel smaller, LinkedIn may refuse to show it. It also doesn't support WebP format at all — use JPG or PNG only.
LinkedIn also caches previews aggressively. The very first time LinkedIn's crawler sees your URL, it stores the result. If that first crawl had a bad image, a server hiccup, or your page wasn't fully deployed yet — that broken preview gets stuck in LinkedIn's cache indefinitely.
Two other common culprits: your og:image URL must be served over HTTPS (HTTP image URLs silently fail), and your server might be blocking LinkedIn's bot. LinkedIn's crawler identifies itself as LinkedInBot. If your hosting provider returns a 403 to that user agent, LinkedIn can't read your tags at all.
How to Fix It: The LinkedIn Post Inspector
LinkedIn provides a free debugging tool specifically for this: the LinkedIn Post Inspector at linkedin.com/post-inspector. Go there, paste the URL that's showing broken, and click Inspect. LinkedIn will ignore its cache and re-crawl your page in real time. You'll see exactly what title, description, and image it found — and any errors it encountered.
If the Post Inspector now shows the correct preview, you're done. LinkedIn has refreshed its cache for that URL and all future posts using that link will look right. If it's still broken, the inspector will tell you exactly why.
Platform-by-Platform Fix Guide
Twitter / X
Twitter uses its own Twitter Card tags, though it falls back to Open Graph if they're missing. Common causes of broken Twitter previews:
- Missing
twitter:cardtag - Your
og:imageURL blocked in robots.txt - Images served over HTTP instead of HTTPS
- Page larger than 2MB
- Stale cache — add
?v=2to force a fresh crawl
Slack
Slack reads standard Open Graph tags and renders them as link unfurls. Main issues: image file over 1MB, server too slow to respond (Slack's bot has a short timeout), or domain-level preview settings in your workspace.
WhatsApp and iMessage
WhatsApp has a hard 300KB limit on og:image file size — it silently drops the preview entirely if the image exceeds this. iMessage reads Open Graph tags but Apple provides no debugging tool. Keep images small.
OG Image Specs by Platform (2026 Reference)
- LinkedIn: 1200×627px, JPG or PNG only (no WebP), max 5MB
- Twitter/X: 1200×628px, JPG/PNG/WebP, max 5MB
- Facebook: 1200×630px, JPG/PNG, max 8MB
- Slack: 1200×630px, under 1MB
- WhatsApp: 1200×630px, hard 300KB limit
- iMessage: 1200×630px, under 500KB
- Universal safe spec: 1200×630px JPG, under 300KB
The Deeper Problem: Links You Don't Own
Even if you fix your own site's OG tags, the preview that platforms have already cached stays broken until forced to re-crawl. And if you're sharing links to pages you don't control — other people's articles, product pages, YouTube videos — you have zero ability to change the tags. You're stuck with whatever that site set.
This is the exact problem Peeksy solves. Peeksy creates a short link that serves its own Open Graph tags — ones you define. When LinkedIn or Twitter crawls your Peeksy link, it reads your custom title, description, and AI-generated image. Your audience sees a perfect preview, then clicks through to the original URL. No code, no cache issues, no waiting on your developer.
The 5-Minute Fix Summary
- Go to linkedin.com/post-inspector and paste your URL
- Review what LinkedIn found and any errors it flagged
- If the image is the wrong size, update to 1200×627px JPG or PNG
- If tags are missing, add Open Graph meta tags to your page's
<head> - If you want permanent control over how any link looks on any platform — use Peeksy